Nxivm Victim, Sally Brink, Tells Story of Nancy Salzman’s Advice on Her Cancer
From the New York Times article on the Neil Glazer Civil Lawsuit comes an interesting facet: The interview with former Nxivm member, now plaintiff in the lawsuit, Sally Brink, who has breast cancer.
The Times story is Nxivm ‘Sex Cult’ Was Also a Huge Pyramid Scheme, Lawsuit Says
Sally Brink is married to Nxivm diehard and Society of Protectors [SOP] leader, Damon Brink.
Sally Brink raised $42,000 on GoFundMe for her cancer treatment. Nxivm leader Nancy Salzman told her she got her cancer to seek attention from her husband.
Sally Brink raised $42,000 on GoFundMe for her cancer treatment. Nxivm leader Nancy Salzman told her she got her cancer in order to get attention from her husband, Damon.
First, let’s republish what the Times wrote about Brink:
“’They get you to not trust your own decision-making process,” said one former member, Sally Brink, who said she paid $145,000 to take Nxivm classes over the years. ‘They tell you that you need them to make decisions. You start to doubt everything.’
Ms. Brink was among the 80 plaintiffs who sued Mr. Raniere and 14 other associates of Nxivm ….
“Ms. Brink, 47, said in an interview that she was introduced to the group in her late 20s. She was struggling as the new co-owner of a restaurant in a Vermont college town, weighed down by 18-hour days.
“Her college roommate recommended turning her life around through Nxivm, pitching it as a class that helped entrepreneurs reach their goals. The roommate told her the program had been developed by a brilliant thinker named Keith Raniere.
“Ms. Brink flew to Los Angeles in 2004 for a five-day course, hosted at a home in the Hollywood Hills. At first, she found the teachings to be profound. Her relationships with her employees and her family improved.
“More than a decade later, however, Ms. Brink was fighting to escape. The worst moment came in 2017, she said, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Nxivm associates told her that she had given herself the disease to get her husband’s attention. Instead of spending the money she had raised online for treatment, they urged her to make the ethical decision to die, she added.”
***
AnonyMaker makes a splendid point about this. He said, “When it came her turn, Nancy Salzman [who had breast cancer] apparently decided not to make the sort of ‘ethical decision’ she must have been promoting. This is pretty shocking, and I wonder if there are cases of members outside the inner circle who died due to following NXIVM’s teachings.”
To answer AnonyMaker: I know of at least one other, non-inner circle woman who got breast cancer– the late Suzanne Kemp.
Kemp was a single, lesbian woman, a millionaire, who had operated a successful business in Texas.
She got into Nxivm and loved it so much [and was love bombed] that she left Texas to live in Albany. Being single, and childless, she made her will out in favor of Keith Raniere.
When she got breast cancer, she was told, much like Brink, that she attracted her cancer, was seeking attention, had low self esteem, and bad disintegrations and, in effect, was better off dead.
The group tried to manage her care but Kemp, not willing to accept the verdict that she caused her own cancer, embarked upon her own, more standard medical treatment, defying Nxivm leaders, Keith Raniere and Nancy Salzman.
She did something else too: She changed her will, leaving her entire estate to various charities and eliminating Nxivm.
Susan Dones, along with her wife Kim, were among the last of Kemp’s Nxivm friends. They helped take care of her at the end. Some days before she died, Steve Ose, a longtime devotee of Raniere and his official Nxivm hacker, came to Kemp’s house. Kemp was at the hospital and Ose got on her computer.
Dones thinks it was to check on the will and do other spying. It seems Ose discovered, just as Kemp was about to die, that she cut Keith out of her will. But the forgery department [Pam Cafritz, who also died of cancer] did not dare do anything. Her will was with her attorney and alas, Suzanne Kemp died, and Raniere got not a dime out of it.
Life can be unjust.
Going back to Sally Brink, she set up a GoFundMe account for her cancer in 2017. She raised $42,092.
Naturally, the beast, Nancy Salzman, blamed Kemp for getting breast cancer. Her husband, Damon Brink, had left Vermont and gave up a prominent business there.
He took the family, Sally included, to Albany to live full time and work for Nxivm.
Before Nxivm Brink was a man with a future and not the chuckle-head he later appeared to be.
Before leaving it all for Nxivm, Brink owned a famous nightclub in Burlington, Vermont, called Nectar’s. The American rock band Phish got their start there. So did Grace Potter and the Nocturnals.
But Damon loved the Nxivm course and grew to love to lie for Raniere. Damon soon became a leader of SOP.
He also soon went broke since he was unable to make a living off of recruiting for Nxivm and SOP.
Still, he was a damn good liar.
Damon once said: “For those of you that don’t know, our founder, Keith Raniere, has built more than 1,000 millionaires in his life. He has built multi-million dollar businesses in a short amount of time and at one point was making more than $100,000 per hour coaching the highest level business executives in the world.”
Bullshit Damon.
SOP video where Damon lies about Keith Raniere.
Regardless of Damon’s failure, and his family’s ever-increasing poverty, Sally got sick.
Nancy blamed Sally for getting cancer and said it was caused by Sally desiring Damon’s attention, acting like an selfish, entitled princess and subconsciously attracting her cancer and just at the worst time – to distract Damon from the more important work of building SOP.
Sally said, Nancy’s advise was to die and let the mission grow.
Ignoring Nancy’s advice, Sally, utilizing both traditional and alternative medicine, beat cancer, for a while. She went into remission in 2018.
Then in 2019, the cancer returned. She fought it again.
Following Raniere’s arrest, Sally and her family moved back to Vermont. Damon wanted to stay, of course. If you lose a wife, it is possible to get another one, but there is only one Keith Raniere.
But hard reality sunk in. Nxivm, except in Mexico, was all but dead.
Hypocrite Nancy Salzman
As AnonyMaker points out, Nancy Salzman, who advised Sally not to spend the $42,000 she raised on cancer treatment, but to die instead, when she got cancer herself, ran for conventional medical help.
It was only a few months after Sally first learned she had breast cancer, then Nancy learned she too had breast cancer.
At first, Nancy told the Nxivm community that she was going to solely use Nxivm tech to cure it. That her breast cancer was a gift she was given to show the world that Nxivm can cure cancer too.
But that quickly changed and Nancy went the full, traditional route including radical mastectomies that removed her breasts.
She had surgery after she was arrested and missed several court hearings in 2018 because she was recovering from her medical treatment.
Nancy Salzman with Sara Bronfman at V-Week 2017.
Nancy Salzman with Sara Bronfman at V-Week 2017. It was here in Sliver Bay when Nancy announced to Nxivm followers that she had breast cancer.
Feckless Nancy
These are very wicked people in Nxivm. One of the wickedest, Nancy ‘Prefect’ Salzman, was quickest to hop on the plea deal bus, jumping ahead of her own daughter, getting only one racketeering felony, instead of two, like her daughter.
Nancy and Lauren Salzman, two grifters off to con the world....
Nancy: ‘I love you darling but I got that first seat on the plea deal bus.”
Nancy has told others in Nxivm that she now realizes Keith tricked her; she had no idea for 20 years he was rotten to the core.
Keith Raniere has owned Nancy Salzman for years. But that ownership may now be rescinded.
Keith Raniere has owned Nancy Salzman for 20 years. But that ownership has been rescinded.
Nancy is, overall, an astounding deceiver, a liar of immense proportions. Next to Clare and, of course, the Creature himself, she deserves a monstrous-long prison sentence. Chances are she will get off lightly.
The early days of Nxivm. L-R Barbara Bouchey, Keith Alan Raniere and Nancy Salzman.
The Creature with Barbara Bouchey and Nancy Salzman
Generous Nxivm Followers
I did find it curious, when reviewing Sally Brink’s GoFundMe page, that a few Nxivm members made contributions.
After she raised some $42,000, I am pretty certain Nancy was pushing her not to spend the money on herself, but to get it to Keith. Not so much because he needed it – he had Bronfman millions and other sources of income – but because these two, Keith and Nancy, hated the idea that anyone would have any money to spend on themselves.
And because I believe Keith wanted her to die.
Maybe Nancy and Keith influenced followers to be parsimonious with Sally. After all, ‘What does it mean when you have extra money on hand and you don’t spend it to make the world and yourself a better person?”
Of the millionaires who donated to the cause of possibly saving the life of their friend:
[redacted] – $1000
Vany Huber -$500
Alex Betancourt gave $270.
Ceci Salinas – $200.
Omar Boone gave $80
Angelica Hinojos, who is a poor Rainbow nanny, working for $15 per hour, donated more than the millionaire Betancourt, donating $300.
Angelica Hinojos
The widow’s mite: Angelica Hinojos gave more than millionaires to help Sally Brink.
Other Nxivm members who contributed:
Wayne LeBaron – $200
Christina Starr – $200.
Siobahn Hotaling $150
Linda Chung – $100
Ginger Macintosh – $50.
Kim Constable – $108.
Lyvia Cohen – $54
Wendy Rosen-Brooks – $200
Amanda Canning – $108
It is curious, Keith Raniere, Nancy Salzman, Allison Mack, Nicki Clyne, Emiliano Salinas, Edgar Boone, and of course, the two heiresses, Clare and Sara Bronfman, did not appear to donate anything.
MK10 ART's painting of Nancy Salzman with the snake like tongue
MK10ART’s painting of Nancy Salzman who taught “Breast cancer is the result of low self-esteem.”
Resorting to GoFundMe for critical health care costs is something also fairly often seen among Scientology cultists, who tend to eschew normal health care and expenses like insurance – and then sometimes end up actually begging for the worst of useless pseudo-science treatments, as a last ditch effort once they are hopelessly ill. Scientology also indoctrinates its followers to blame themselves for “pulling in” illnesses – and even injuries from accidents.
Besides Kemp's case, I'd suspect there are still others out there that just have yet to be revealed. And then there have to be more cases of people who suffered significant harm to their mental health, like the little cluster we know about around the time of Snyder's case – I wonder if there are any of those among the plaintiffs.
And the claim about Raniere's supposed executive coaching is bizarre, but not unexpected for a cult like that – it's sort of the American version of Indian gurus' claims of miracles. Raniere might have made some kind of money before the 2003 Forbes article seems to have ended his ability to attract a few actual truly successful executives, rather than a bunch of wannabes and a smattering of moderately successful entrepreneurs, but the only time he could possibly have made $100,000 per hour was when he was fleecing the Bronfmans.